When a stranger says "ChatGPT sent me"
Marc runs a one-man electrical business. Sockets, fuse boxes, the occasional full rewire when a house survey turns up something scary. He got a call in August from someone he'd never met and never advertised to, who opened with "ChatGPT said you were the person to call." Marc hadn't done anything. No ads, no agency, he hadn't even logged into his Google Business Profile in over a year. He just happened to be the electrician an AI chatbot decided to mention.
That's a real, measurable thing now, not a fluke. BrightLocal, a local-search research firm, surveyed over a thousand US consumers in February 2026 and found 45% had used an AI tool like ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI Mode to find a local business in the past year, up from 6% the year before. AI is now the third most common way people discover a local business, ahead of Yelp and TripAdvisor, behind only Google and Facebook. That's a US survey, and results here won't match it exactly, but ChatGPT alone has grown past 900 million weekly users worldwide this year, so the shift underneath it isn't a US-only story.
The question Marc actually asked me was simpler: how does it decide who to mention? Not magic, and not ad spend. Worth explaining properly.
How an AI chatbot actually decides who to recommend
An AI chatbot doesn't "know" your business the way someone who walked past your shop knows it. When a person asks for a recommendation, most of these tools go and look, right then, at what's publicly written about you: your Google Business Profile, review sites, your own website, anywhere your name and services appear. Then they check whether it all agrees. The same hours, the same address, and the same list of services, stated the same way in three different places, add up to a stronger signal than one glossy website nobody else corroborates.
Trustpilot ran a study across more than 800,000 real AI answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Mode and found a stark gap: brands with no active review profile on their own platform showed up in about 1% of relevant answers. Brands with an active, regularly-answered profile and a real base of reviews showed up in roughly 75%. Those are one review platform's numbers about its own platform, so treat the exact figures as directional, not universal. But the shape of it matches what the mechanism above predicts: these tools lean on what other people, not you, have publicly said about your business.
This is a different mechanism from the one I explained in Can You Stop AI From Training on Your Website?, and worth telling apart. That article covered training bots quietly folding your content into a model's permanent memory, which you might reasonably want to block. This is about search bots answering a live question right now, using your public information as a source. You can block the first without losing the second, and for most small businesses, you actually want the second one working.
What if you've never touched your Google Business Profile?
Then, honestly, you're probably invisible to this whole channel. Not penalized, just absent. Nothing catastrophic happened. But an unclaimed or half-filled profile, a website that states opening hours only as text inside a photo of the storefront sign, and zero reviews anywhere, together mean there's almost nothing for an AI chatbot to cite even if it wanted to mention you. It isn't being unfair. It just has nothing to work with.
What this doesn't fix
This isn't a hack, and I'd be lying if I said it was. Claiming your profile and asking a few customers for reviews doesn't guarantee an AI chatbot will ever say your name; these systems weigh many signals you can't see or control, and a competitor with more reviews or a stronger web presence may simply win more often. You also can't fully control what an AI says about you once it starts citing public sources, the same way you never fully controlled what strangers said about you on a review site. And this channel still sends far fewer customers than Google Maps or a good sign on the street, for now. Don't rebuild your marketing around it.
One thing to check this week
Open ChatGPT or Perplexity and ask it directly: "who's a good [your trade] near [your town]?" See if you come up, and whether what it says about you is even accurate. Then claim or check your Google Business Profile, and make sure your hours, address and services are written as plain text somewhere on your own site too, not just inside an image. That's the whole first step. Reviews and consistency do the rest, slowly, the way they always have.